In Memoriam

Dawn Clements, a Civitella Fellow in 2012, has died today at age sixty from cancer.

Born in 1958 in Woburn, Massachusetts, Clements received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and, in 1989, her MFA at the State University of New York in Albany. She was an assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Clements was based in Brooklyn and represented by Pierogi Gallery. In addition to her numerous galleries exhibitions, her work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tang Museum, and The Saatchi Collection, among other institutions. “In film, time is often condensed to fit into a two-hour format, Clements told Aschheim. “A day might last a few minutes. In soap operas it’s exactly the opposite. A day might last an entire week because there are so many stories to tell. It goes on and on for years. I love that kind of time also.”

Dawn imagined intimate, intricate interiors in both sprawling and compact drawings. Her drawings played with perspective and often spilled across multiple pieces of paper in distorted panoramas that explored memory, space, and home.

Dawn will be deeply missed by her Civitella family.